Skyjacker – Interactive Plane Watching

Skyjacker is the perfect app for those that want to take their plane watching and make it interactive.

Plenty of people enjoy watching and tracking planes as a hobby. Tracking their progress, sighting them along routes and noting when delays or issues occur. However, no one has ever been able to make a game out of it.

Skyjacker provides the solution to this rather dull hobby by making the entire experience rewarding through interactivity. Now, using GPS location services, you can track individual planes flying nearby. You even turn your phone on its side and get a pair of binoculars to pinpoint the precise plane you want to track.

However, Skyjacker doesn’t stop at just tracking planes – true to its name, Skyjacker has you wrest control of the plane and divert it to another airport. Once you reach the airport, you gain points based on the type of plane, the location and the number of miles travelled.

At first, this seems very simplistic, but Skyjacker appreciates that plane trackers know their stuff. You can only divert to airports within your fuel range – alongside that, you gain rewards based on achieving unique locations and plane types. Get the Boeing 747 for the first time? Extra rewards!

... you gain rewards based on achieving unique locations and plane types. Get the Boeing 747 for the first time? Extra rewards!

It is surprisingly titillating to divert a flight flying to Heathrow, peacefully drifting in its merry way, and suddenly divert it to Charle de Gaulle airport. One can only imagine the confusion on the pilots and passenger’s faces as they suddenly turn south for France, the controls wrested from the pilots hands. All so that you can grab extra points and unlock a new location.

To facilitate your plane tracking, you can spend your points to acquire sidekicks, so as to be able to track multiple planes at the same time. Alongside this, you can hire people to track planes in other places in the world, allowing you infinitely more possibilities to track planes and get points.

The chief purpose of Skyjacker is making plane tracking more interactive and enjoyable. To that end, the primary reason to skyjack planes is to gather them as collectibles at the end, to symbolize what you’ve come across. After a few months of Skyjacking, you’ll be in possession of dozens, if not scores, of different types of planes and airports, allowing you a handy way of keeping track of what planes you’ve encountered.

Skyjacker provides an example of the app marketplace taking something in real life that serves its purpose, but doesn’t live up to its potential. Skyjacker combines interactive fun with plane tracking and collecting.

It is difficult to comprehend what is essentially a plane tracking version of an interactive stamp collecting game, or how on earth it would able to become something so exceptionally interesting.

The real worry of playing Skyjacker is that you might actually get incredibly focused on collecting everything, then suddenly find yourself at your local airport with binoculars, tracking planes right at the source.